Sunday Afternoon at the Opera - Vivaldi: L'Incoronazione di Dario

Sunday Afternoon at the Opera host Keith Brown writes:

If you're an astute follower of opera you've surely at least heard of Claudio Monteverdi's L'Incoronazione di Poppea ("The Coronation of Poppea," 1642), and I've broadcast recordings of that early baroque masterpiece several times in the past. Well, get ready for "The Coronation of Darius," in Italian, L'Incoronazione di Dario (1717), one of the many operas of another baroque master, Antonio Vivaldi. The violin virtuoso, author of the famous "Four Seasons" concertos and so much other instrumental music, actually spent much of his career writing and staging operas. Twenty or so of them survive complete, others in fragmentary scores, totaling at least 38 works, possibly as high as 49. Piles of Vivaldi manuscripts are preserved in the National University Library at Turin.

L'Incoronazione di Dario was the entertainment rather belatedly substituted for an opera by another composer that was suddenly withdrawn at the start of the 1716-17 Carnival season in Venice. Like so much of Vivaldi's output, Dario was written in haste, yet crafted meticulously, nonetheless, and proved to be a crowdpleaser at the Theatro San Angelo.

Two Italian musicologists prepared the score of Dario for its modern performing edition: Stefano Aresi (Act One) and Giovanni Andrea Secchi (Acts Two and Three). Their scholarship has made possible the historically-informed recorded performance of "The Coronation of Darius" for the French label Naïve in its ongoing Vivaldi Edition series. Ottavio Dantone leads the period instrumentalists of the Accademia Bizantina of Ravenna and eight vocal soloists who are schooled in baroque singing practice. The recording was produced by Deutschland Radio of Bremen and released in 2013 on three compact discs.